This month on Twitter, @sotachetan hosts #BrandedInSongs – which is a head-on collision of my personal world of music and my professional world of branding and advertising. The challenge is to simply pick a song with a brand name in its lyrics or title. I added one more criteria to my picks, which is this: the songs themselves must be as iconic as the brands they mention. No filler here.
The Dream Academy is rarely mentioned among the great British synth-pop bands of the eighties. But they made more than just a splash via the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off soundtrack (“The Edge Of Forever” and their Smiths cover “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”) and this top ten hit, “Life In A Northern Town”. Their sound was bright, ethereal and dream-like. And there’s really no other band quite like them.
“Life In A Northern Town” was their U.S. breakthrough. This is most likely due to the catchy and unforgettable “hey ma ma ma ma” chant. It’s that radio-friendly hook that made the song a staple. It was just the sort of thing that was easily loved, but then reached a saturation point pretty quickly. It wasn’t until more than two decades after the single was released that I learned the song was an elegy for Nick Drake. This only increased my admiration for the song as 1985 was well before most of the world uncovered the great folk annals of Nick Drake’s music.
“A Salvation Army band played. And the children drank lemonade. And the morning lasted all day.”